Producers: James L. Brooks, Richard Sakai, Julie Ansell and Jennifer Brooks   Director: James L. Brooks   Screenplay: James L. Brooks   Cast: Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri, Albert Brooks, Woody Harrelson, Spike Fearn, Rebecca Hall, Julie Kavner, Becky Ann Baker, Joey Brooks and Kellen Raffaelo   Distributor: Disney/20^th Century Studios

Grade: D+

In her infamous review of Michael Cimino’s first, epic-sized version of “Heaven’s Gate,” Pauline mused that as she watched the film, “I thought it was easy to see what to cut.  But when I tried afterward to think of what to keep, my mind went blank.”  A viewer of “Ella McCay” might feel the same way.  The picture is lumpen, disjointed and clumsily paced, suggesting it has already undergone emergency surgery in the editing room.  That would hardly have been a new experience for writer-director James L. Brooks, whose “I’ll Do Anything” (1994) was originally a musical, but had its songs removed after disastrous pre-screenings; it was recut into a simple rom-com that was no success, but was at least presentable. 

In this case there were no musical numbers to excise, but if what’s left on the screen is any indication, what was jettisoned must have been horrible indeed.  There are a few chuckles to be had in the material featuring Albert Brooks, a regular in Brooks’s movies, and a few more to be found in Jamie Lee Curtis’ scenes.  Otherwise, “Ella McCay” is pretty dreadful.

As played by Emma Mackey, whose performance can be described as unfailingly desperate and frantic, the title character is introduced as a high school senior in the mid-1970s (though it’s unchivalrous to say so, the actress doesn’t make a convincing teen, nor do production designer Richard Toyon or costumers Ann Roth and Matthew Pachtman manage much of a period ambience).  Her parents are in the midst of a domestic crisis: dad Eddie (Woody Harrelson), the subject of charges of sexual misconduct at work, has been fired, and mom (Rebecca Hall) has decided to stay with him anyway. 

The lives of Ella and her younger brother Casey (Kellen Raffaelo) are upended over their parents’ decision to move to California for a new start (the state they’re living in is left unstated, though the movie was shot mostly in Rhode Island).  Casey is shipped off to military boarding school, while Ella’s housed temporarily with Helen (Curtis, decked out in a frightful black wig), Eddie’s feisty sister, to finish high school before going off to college.  It’s during the ensuing year that Ella gets involved with classmate Ryan Newell (Jack Lowden, in an even worse wig and, to be uncharitable, even less convincing than Mackey as a teen), and soon after that her mother dies.

Skipping ahead to 2008, Ella is married to Ryan (though she hasn’t taken his name) and, always the idealistic overachiever, is the state’s lieutenant governor, loyal aide to popular Governor Bill (Albert Brooks).  When Bill’s chosen to become the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, McCay succeeds him, though her tendency to expound on her wonkish ideas interminably tends to turn her fellow pols, if not the public, off.  She wants to suppress the practice of officeholders spending most of their time on the phone raising campaign contributions.  She’s also intent on establishing a hotline to help out homeowners and tenants during the Bush-era financial collapse, as well as something she calls “Tooth Tutors,” a volunteer scheme to bring proper dental treatment to underserved rural areas.

While Ella’s pushing such progressive help-the-people schemes, however, she has problems closer to home.  Ryan, a real cad, not only demands, at the suggestion of his cynical mother (Becky Ann Baker), a major role in Ella’s administration, but has embroiled her in a possible scandal involving the use of government buildings for their marital trysts. Simultaneously Eddie returns to seek Ella’s absolution for his misdeeds—in response to the insistence of his new squeeze, a psychologist, that he seek forgiveness from his kids. 

That also leads Ella to reconnect with the reclusive Casey (now Spike Fearn, overacting horribly), who spends his days holed up in his apartment making millions providing advice about sports betting to paying customers.  She accidentally ingests some of his weed—a plot point which comes to nothing—but succeeds in convincing him to try reconciling with his erstwhile girlfriend Susan (Ayo Edebiri).  That leads to a weird turn in the last act, with Casey’s return to the world taking over the running-time for an absurdly long time; an interminable sequence in which he woos Susan back into his life is positively cringe-worthy, though Edebiri is engaging in it.

Mackey is stuck trying to sell all this saccharine nonsense with a perpetually frazzled air that grows increasingly insufferable, and even Curtis’ energy as the incessantly supportive Aunt Helen isn’t much help.  Nor is the presence of Kumail Nanjiani as Nash, the hangdog state trooper assigned as Ella’s chauffeur who appears to have a rather creepy devotion to her. 

Meanwhile Julie Kavner narrates the whole story in her Marge Simpson voice as Estelle, Ella’s caustic but utterly loyal secretary; the audience will gobble up her crotchety contributions, which are used to paper over the script’s lackadaisical transitions and the lapses in Tracey Wadmore-Smith’s editing.  It’s particularly difficult to understand why Brooks decided to include a particularly terrible bit about Nash’s partner, who tries to finagle overtime out of the job, especially since it’s Joey Brooks, the director’s own son, who’s saddled with trying to breathe some life into the laugh-free episode.  Is this some sort of paternal punishment?    

As a final debit, Robert Elswit’s lensing is undistinguished, and Hans Zimmer’s score is the quintessence of sappy uplift.  It’s kept to a low volume for the most part, though—a rarity in these days of musical bombast in movies, and very welcome here, even if it leaves one able to hear the witless dialogue with complete clarity.

Things turn out well for Ella in the end, of course, despite the forces arrayed against her—and for Casey too—while those who’ve made her life difficult get their just deserts, carefully laid out for you.  But there’s little satisfaction to be had from such cloyingly obvious twists.    

It’s no pleasure to write so negatively about a film from Brooks.  He’s had a distinguished career, in both television (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Taxi,” “Lou Grant,” “The Simpsons”) and film (“Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News,” “As Good As It Gets”).  But his later films—“Spanglish” and “How Do You Know”—suggested that he’d lost his touch.  With “Ella McCay” he offers a stale bucket of CapraCorn that despite a strenuous effort to make us feel good, leaves a bad taste.      

Producers: Brunson Green, Anna Todd, Flavia Viotti and Robert Kulzer   Director: Josh Boone   Screenplay: Susan McMartin   Cast: Allison Williams, Dave Franco, Mckenna Grace, Mason Thames, Scott Eastwood, Willa Fitzgerald, Clancy Brown, Sam Morelos and Ethan Costanilla    Distributor: Paramount

Grade: D+

If she were alive today, even Fannie Hurst would be embarrassed to have written a woman’s weepie as synthetic and sappy as “Regretting You.”  Yet Colleen Hoover’s 2019 novel was yet another hit in the writer’s string of them, and it’s been brought to the screen in glossy but pedestrian fashion by Josh Boone (“The Fault in Our Stars”), working from an adaptation by Susan McMartin.  The picture is a weirdly tone-deaf treatment of material that mixes tragedy with almost sitcomish fluff in a brew that comes across as both tasteless and unintentionally bonkers.

It all begins in 2007, with a high school graduation beach party on the North Carolina coast outside the small town of Dylan, where four friends are celebrating their entrance into what in this case could be called the real world only sarcastically.  Despite a bit of de-aging, the actors are all too old for their characters, but what’s more striking is that they’re obviously wrongly coupled.  Sweet Morgan Davidson (Allison Wilson) is with frattish bro Chris Grant (Scott Eastwood), who actually says he likes her best when she’s drunk, while nerdy Jonah Sullivan (Dave Franco) is with Morgan’s wild sister Jenny (Willa Fitzgerald) despite his obvious infatuation with Morgan.  This prologue ends with Morgan admitting to Jonah that she’s pregnant.

Seventeen years later Morgan and Chris are married, living in his parents’ old track house with their effervescent daughter Clara (Mckenna Grace).  They’re having a birthday barbecue with Jenny and Jonah, who’d been long apart but reconnected when the latter returned to Dylan to teach in the high school; Jenny got pregnant, and now they have an infant son. 

All are awaiting Clara’s arrival, but she’s delayed when she stops along the road to help her classmate Miller Adams (Mason Thames), who lives with his ill grandpa Hank (Clancy Brown) and is moving the “town limits” sign for a cute reason Clara appreciates.  Though Miller’s got a girlfriend, he clearly has eyes for Clara (and she for him), and before long they’ll be a secret couple—secret because his daddy is a drug-dealer in prison and Morgan doesn’t approve of her daughter seeing him, despite Jonah’s assurances that he’s a good kid (indeed, he proves ultra-sensitive to everyone’s feelings). (After all, it probably wouldn’t help Morgan’s case to say, “Do as I say, not as I did.”)

But the Clara-Mason romance is only one half of the story here: the other arises from a car crash that calls Morgan and Jonah to the hospital at the same time: Chris and Jenny were killed as they were both riding in her car.  It turns out they were having an affair—although it’s never raised, the really creepy question is for how long—and the paternity of Jenny’s child will become an issue.  But at least the tragedy allows Morgan and Jonah finally to become the couple they were destined to be way back in 2007, and it only took the deaths of two people—and unfaithful people at that!—to bring it about.

There’s actually a third romance in the story, between Clara’s sharp-tongued BFF Lexie (Sam Lorelos) and Efren (Ethan Costanilla), Miller’s dorky co-worker at the AMC multiplex.  Miller and Clara bring them together, providing a measure of comic relief to material that the makers apparently thought was too serious (despite the sitcom touches they add to it), as well as yet another opportunity for the product placement that’s ubiquitous throughout.  (The most egregious example comes with the movie posters covering the walls of Miller’s bedroom—he wants to go to film school, you see—all of which seem to be of old Paramount releases. But AMC theatres are frequently advertised too.)

There’s a shamelessness to that, and to the movie as a whole; it can’t even do without a happy revelation about crusty old Hank at the very close: he may be dying, but he possesses an unexpectedly big legacy to leave to Miller!

This sort of sad-happy drivel may be the right stuff for Hoover readers, but when transferred to the screen it requires careful handling not to become ridiculous.  Whatever his misdeeds behind the camera might have been, Justin Baldoni (and screenwriter Christy Hall) came closer to solving the problem in “It Ends With Us” than McMartin and Boone do here, despite the efforts of a game cast.  The older actors don’t fare especially well—Williams is artificial and Franco excessively dweebish, while Eastwood and Fitzgerald aren’t around long enough to leave much of an impression. 

But Grace and Thames make an engaging couple, though both—especially she—have some uncomfortable moments in the more “serious” episodes.  And it’s nice to see him in a role that doesn’t require fleeing from serial killers (“Black Phone”), demons (“Monster Summer”) or huge beasties (“How to Train Your Dragon”).  If the evidence in this case and in “Stars” is any indication, perhaps Boone is more attuned to material involving the younger generation.

The crafts team—production designer Bittany Hites, costumer Erinn Knight, cinematographer Tim Orr—do a reasonably good job, though the Georgia-shot movie has more of a cable look (think Hallmark Channel) than that of a major theatrical release.  The editing by Marc Clark and Robb Sullivan often feels oddly out of whack—some sequences (like Morgan’s manic house renovation and her angry attack on Chris’s car) are overextended, and others that might be expected are simply absent (Chris gets a big funeral, but Jenny none).  One might also wonder about the curious lack of secondary characters—we’re shown tons of food dropped off in front of the Grant home in the wake of Chris’s death, for example, but nary a glimpse of anybody leaving it.  Nate Walcott’s score is utterly unexceptional.                            

Hoover’s legion of loyal fans might disagree, but “Regretting You” represents a distinct falling-off from “It Ends With Us.”  If that downward trend continues, the Hoover Boomlet (a couple of other adaptations are in the works) may be shorter-lived than the Nicholas Sparks one was: in any event, the title might refer to you regretting shelling out your hard-earned cash to see it.